Paris and the Social Revolution Part 20

That other great Francois (Rabelais) has portrayed the democratic and turbulent temper of the students of a somewhat later period.

During the reign of Louis XIV., the merry, strolling players and mountebanks, Tabarin and Gaultier-Garguille (the latter the inventor of the farce), had numerous imitators among the students; which jovial humour did not prevent the latter from entering heartily into the _Fronde_,[65] risking their lives on "the Day of the Barricades" and exercising their caustic wit against the court and the hated foreign minister, Mazarin, in lampoons called _Mazarinades_.

The trenchant criticisms and the comprehensive formulas, which appeared in the Encyclopedists' published works, captivated many professors of the university,[66] and made a direct and profound impression on the students. But it seems to be no exaggeration to say that it was the cafes and cabarets of the Left Bank rather than the university that fanned the smouldering flame of discontent into a conflagration of rebellion. In them the fiercest revolutionary clubs of the epoch had their rendezvous. At the _Cafe Procope_,-transformed, alas! into a vulgar restaurant only a year or so back,-Hebert presided over a club which burned before the door the journals found too tame for its ideas, and Danton met with Marat, Legendre, and Fabre d'Eglantine; and the Procope was only one of a score. Indeed, it would take a volume to do full justice to the part played in French history by the Latin Quarter cafes from 1780 to Napoleon's establishment of himself in power.

Under the Restoration the social and political Utopias of the Icarians, the Fourierites, and the Saint-Simonians, commanded the interest, if not the allegiance, of a considerable portion of the university. "The new Sorbonne," says Vacherot, "far from viewing unmoved the liberal movement which was to culminate in the revolution of July, partic.i.p.ated in it actively, lending it the prestige of its most _spirituel_, its most serious, and its most eloquent teaching."

It was in great part the students, as all know who have followed the vicissitudes of Marius and Cosette in _Les Miserables_, who were responsible for the insurrection of 1830.

It was in the spheres of literature and art, however, where Romanticism was struggling to supplant Cla.s.sicism, that the hottest pa.s.sions were kindled. The influence of Scott, Byron, and the rising Hugo dominated, even in the matter of dress. Romanticists adopted the costumes of Moslems, Corsairs, and Giaours: the _Quartier_ resembled a fancy-dress ball-room, and men fought in its streets for their artistic as they had in other times for their political and religious creeds.

The students of the reign of Louis Philippe have been thus pictured by De Banville: "Young, gay, reckless, but possessed of native distinction, coquettishly arrayed in velvet and all sorts of original and fancy costumes, capped with Basque _berets_ and felts _a la_ Rubens, they went up and down, sauntering, singing, gazing into s.p.a.ce, alone, or in pairs, or in groups, or three by three, selling their text-books willingly at the old book dealers in order to enter the cabaret,-a custom which, as you know, dates from the twelfth century."

Of this same youth and that which came immediately after it Aurelien Scholl writes: "The young men of the schools thought solely of fetes and of fun. The _Quartier_ resembled strangely the _Boheme_ of Murger,-_la noce_, nothing but _la noce_. The historiographer of this epoch finds only farces to narrate, and such farces!"

And yet the students played almost as large a part in the revolution of 1848 as in that of 1830. Under their masks of flippancy they were serious. They had merely been waiting for the strategic moment and a leader; and, when in 1847 Antonio Watripon, bent on a "reawakening of the schools," founded a journal, _La Lanterne du Quartier Latin_, as a means of organising and directing the student opposition, they took an active part in the demonstrations which brought about the downfall of the government of Louis Philippe.

They sprang to arms again, soon after, against the disillusionising _coup d'etat_ of the third Napoleon, while the workingmen remained relatively submissive. "At the news that Louis Napoleon is getting ready to confiscate the public liberties," says Scholl, "a wave of indignation sweeps over the length and breadth of the _Quartier_. The students invade, and p.r.o.nounce inflammatory discourses in, cafe after cafe, _cremerie_ after _cremerie_. They descend without hesitation into the street to combat the troops of the tyrant, and many pay for their heroism with their lives."

The discouragement which followed the complete establishment of the authority of the usurper naturally gave rise to a sort of la.s.situde, which was mistaken by many for sycophancy or indifference, and was generally regarded as proof positive of the degeneration of the student type. But the students, although temporarily silent and outwardly submissive, had not disarmed. It was not long before Valles, Gambetta, Vermesch, Blanqui, Rochefort, and scores of others, who partic.i.p.ated a little later in the Commune or in the founding of the Third Republic, were busily sowing the seeds of disaffection in the cafes; and in 1865 this fresh revolutionary movement was given coherence and direction by _Les Propos de Labienus_, the little masterpiece of Rogeard.

It was, in point of fact, mainly in the cafes of the Latin Quarter rather than in the university proper that the revolution of 1871, as well as that of 1789, was fermented.

In 1866, at the _Cafe de la Renaissance h.e.l.lenique_, a revolutionary club was formed, consisting of eight persons, the oldest of whom was barely twenty-two,-five law students, a medical student, a painter, and a _rentier_,-the first overt act of which was a riotous protest against the production of Augier's _La Contagion_ at the _Odeon_. Most, if not all, of the charter members of this club, which was soon consolidated with a club of older men meeting at the _Cafe Serpente_, saw the inside of the prison of Ste. Pelagie before the Commune was achieved.

"The Renaissance," says Auguste Lepage in his _Cafes Artistiques et Litteraires de Paris_, "had a special physiognomy at the absinthe hour and after dinner. Noisy, uncombed students entered, mounted to the second floor, got together in groups, and talked politics or took a turn at billiards. They lighted long pipes, artistically coloured; and through the smoke clouds might be heard, together with the voices of the speechifiers, the clicks of the ivory b.a.l.l.s as they met on the green cus.h.i.+ons. _Etudiantes_ accompanied the students. These strikingly dressed girls smoked cigarettes and occupied themselves with politics."

The imperial police had a special fondness for the Renaissance, and this cafe shared with the _Bra.s.serie de St. Severin_, after the Commune was set up, the distinction of being used as a headquarters by the Communard officials.

The Procope, also affected by police spies, was frequented by Spuller, Ferry, Floquet, Vermorel, and Gambetta, who preserved their liberty on more than one occasion by utilising the back door, which had rendered a similar service to Danton in another century.

The _Cafe Voltaire_ harboured, among others, Gambetta and Valles, the _Cafe de Buci_ Valles and Delescluze, and the _Bra.s.serie Audler_ and the _Restaurant Laveur_ Courbet and his unconventional intimates.

To summarise: from the time of Abelard-the Abelard who was sustained and inspired by the thought of the flaming lips of Helose pressed against the convent grating-to and through the Commune, the _Pays Latin_ was characterised by a revolutionary spirit which was composed of three seemingly independent, if not mutually antagonistic, but, in reality, complementary and vitally interrelated traits,-love of laughter, love of liberty, and love of love.

The different persons of this emanc.i.p.ating trinity were equally potent impellers to Quixotic thought and action; and no one of the three could have long survived-such is the French temperament in or out of the _Quartier_-without both of the others. The Gallic imagination and conscience are dependent on good cheer and affection; they cease to operate if a fellow may not unbend in buffoonery with the boys and may not adore a woman. And, without conscience and imagination, is no revolution.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NOTRE DAME FROM PONT D'AUSTERLITZ]

_"Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man_

_Ever the grappled mystery of all Earth's ages old or new;_

_Ever the soul dissatisfied, curious, unconvinced at last; Struggling to-day the same-battling the same."_

WALT WHITMAN.

CHAPTER X

THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT IN THE LATIN QUARTER OF TO-DAY

_"Each Jack with his Jill."_

BEN JONSON.

_"What is love? 'Tis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter; What's to come is still unsure: In delay there lies no plenty; Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty; Youth's a stuff will not endure."_

SHAKESPEARE.

_"It once might have been, once only: We lodged in a street together, You, a sparrow on the house-top lonely, I, a lone she-bird of his feather."_

ROBERT BROWNING.

_"The role of a pretty woman is more serious than we think."_

MONTESQUIEU (Lettres Persanes).

_"I was twenty, age when the heart all illumined with poesy guards religiously the subtile vibrations of the beautiful and the just; the sweet human season in which one yearns to have a thousand mouths to bite to bleeding-during an eternity-the bare pink bosoms of the beautiful chimeras that go singing by."_-CLOVIS HUGUES.

"_I shall eternally hide my deepest emotions under the mask of_ insouciance _and the perruque of irony._"

JULES VALLeS, in Jacques Vingtras-Le Bachelier.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CAVEAU OF THE LATIN QUARTER]

A great deal has been said of late years about the change which has taken place in the _Pays Latin_ and in the student character. The "old boys" tell us, with sneering superiority or quavering regret, that the _Quartier Latin_ is no longer what it was. Some evoke the revels and the _grisettes_ depicted in Louis Huart's _Physiologie de l'Etudiant_, Musset's _Mimi Pinson_, and Murger's _La Vie de Boheme_, and others the rebellious souls of the student martyrs of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871.

According to the former, the contemporary student is a morose, prudent, selfish, woman-hating, digging prig, with no higher dreams than pettifogging politics and bourgeois comfort, and the _etudiante_ a scheming, avaricious adventuress. According to the latter, he is sn.o.bbish, extravagant, and dissipated, a brainless spendthrift, gambler, debauchee, and drunkard, and his amorette, aside from differences of s.e.x, his perfect counterpart.

There is truth in these somewhat conflicting charges, since both these types of student do exist. The curious thing is that similar complaints have been made by the alumni out in the world for almost as long as there have been alumni. It is not easy to go back far enough into the history of the _Quartier Latin_ to escape caustic aspersions on its ign.o.ble present and fond reversions to its fine and proper past.